Albina Apanaeva (Альбина Апанаева in Russian) is a Tatar singer. She performs pop music in the Tatar language, and occasionally in Russian. She also currently works as an event organizer, though she’s best known as a singer—she’s sometimes even called the most popular Tatar pop singer.

Apanaeva was born in Naberezhnye Chelny (Яр Чаллы in Tatar), a big city in Tatarstan, Russia. She attended the Kazan State University of Culture and Arts (Казанский государственный университет культуры и искусств) and released her debut record, The Roads Are All the Same (Барыбер кадерле), in 2005. She released two others in 2007 and 2013, but she seems to have taken a break since then to focus on other projects (both family- and work-related). She worked with the Kazan recording studios Oscar Records and Bars Records, and DVD recordings of her concerts are available online.

Apanaeva has taken part in the Tatar Song (Татар җыры) festival, an international celebration of Tatar music that takes place yearly in Kazan, several times. She won an award there in 2004, when she performed her song “Чын дустым” (translation unavailable). She’s collaborated several times with Dilya Nigmatullina (Диля Нигматуллина), whose fans proclaim her “the queen of Tatar pop music.” Nigmatullina studied with Apanaeva in Kazan and calls her one of her best friends.

Apanaeva is now largely marketing herself as an event organizer on VK and Instagram, though her various Internet fan clubs still pay homage to her music. She runs an event hall called Apanay (Апанай), where she leads events. One review, supposedly quoting a government representative, praised her in particular, calling her “a person with an open soul” whose “songs and smile reflect her inner world.”

Julie is currently studying Russian as a Second Language in Irkutsk (and before that, Bishkek) with SRAS's Home and Abroad Scholarship program, with the goal of someday having some sort of Russia/Eurasia-related career. She recently got her master’s degree from the University of Glasgow and the University of Tartu, where she studied women’s dissent in Soviet Russia. She also has a bachelor’s degree in literature from Yale. Some of her favorite Russian authors are Sorokin, Shishkin, Il’f and Petrov, and Akhmatova. In her spare time Julie cautiously practices martial arts, reads feminist websites, and taste-tests instant coffee for her blog.

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